The Confessor

by Mark Allen Smith

  ‘All right,’ said Dalton’s voice. ‘One moment.’

  Geiger was locked into Ezra’s father’s face. He’d only met the man once, on July Fourth in Central Park, for no more than five minutes. The man whose obsession for truth had put everything in motion. Geiger studied the unfocused gaze . . . the throb of the carotid artery . . . the potent melancholy of the man. It was like watching a play he’d seen a hundred times, but from a very different seat. He was aware of a heavier ping in his pulse. This is what I did, he thought.

  Dalton’s voice returned. ‘Here is some water.’ A hand came into frame with a glass of water – and tossed the liquid in Matheson’s face. Then the scene cut back to Dalton, sitting in the barber’s chair.

  ‘Well done, right? Simple, not over-the-top. I think it’s quite convincing – and if you involve yourself any further in this matter, if you attempt to find me, if you send someone here with Geiger and I become aware of your presence, the video goes to all the usual suspects. MSNBC, CNN, Fox, the networks.’ He put his glasses back on, and toggled them a few times before satisfied with their perch on his thin nose. ‘I hope to see you soon, Geiger. As I said – there is much to talk about. If you aren’t here in, say – four days – I’ll assume you aren’t coming, and I’ll kill these two.’

  The screen went black. Zanni ejected the disk and sat on the desk. Geiger looked different to her, somehow. With the way he sat slightly atilt in the chair, now his nakedness and wounds made him seem younger, vulnerable.

  ‘Did either of them know you were alive?’ she asked.

  ‘Harry did. And they work together. So he may have told Matheson.’

  ‘Cards on the table, Geiger. Yes – we want him dead. We can’t have him running around loose in the fun-house. Yes – we have no idea where he is, and following you is probably the only way for us to find him. We’d get you a ticket, passport. You’d fly to Paris on a regular airline . . . so it looks like you’re on your own – in case they start a tail. I’d be there before you and hook up with a contractor. We’d play it by ear – stay out of sight, but be close. We’d be your cavalry – move in when it was time.’ She shrugged. ‘I just need an answer.’

  The cat jumped into Geiger’s lap and started kneading his stomach. Geiger’s hand went to the animal’s head and began scratching the scar. The action looked reflexive, comforting – a thoughtless response of an otherwise occupied mind. There were hands and voices reaching for him, from within and without. He was a magnet, powerless to turn off the force at his core that drew them near.

  ‘I need time before I go,’ he said. ‘A day . . . to take care of some things.’

  Zanni nodded. ‘I don’t suppose you’d come to DC for a briefing . . . ’

  ‘No. I don’t feel that’s necessary.’

  ‘All right. I’ll be back here morning after tomorrow.’ She slid off the desk. ‘I’m sorry, Geiger.’

  ‘What are you sorry about?’

  ‘That he’s put you where you are. I’m the one who debriefed Dalton. I know what he did to you.’

  He looked up at her.

  ‘You debriefed Dalton?’

  ‘Yes. You made quite a mess of him, Geiger. You know what he said about you?’

  ‘What did he say about me?’

  ‘He said you were indestructible.’

  Geiger’s gaze was glass, a mirror. Zanni saw nothing of him, only herself, and she walked to the door and went out.

  There had not been any portion of any moment when he’d felt himself in a decision-making mode. Information had been received, and the result was the instant ignition of a plan. And it was not, foremost, about saving Matheson’s life . . . or even Harry’s. It was about Ezra’s life, and what the rest of it might be like without a father. Dalton had bet everything on that, and he had been right.

  Geiger and Ezra had spent twenty-two hours together. Less than a day.

  Midnight, 3 July, in the session room . . .

  Geiger, prepared to work on Matheson, had opened the trunk to find that Hall had delivered Ezra instead, bound and taped and terrified. He’d knocked Hall unconscious and brought the boy home – the first person to ever share the space with him.

  Ezra’s melancholy and candor and growing trust had been like a crowbar jammed into a crack in Geiger’s shell, slowly prying it open. Their shared hunger for music, their tenuous, solitary places on the landscape, and ultimately traveling partners down a road of violence and death that ended the next night, at ten o’clock, in a desperate tangle of bodies beneath the river.

  In the following months, Geiger had come to suspect that in saving the boy he had unknowingly tried to save himself – to resurrect the buried child in him so he might heal and change – and he came to realize that, in a sense, Ezra had rescued him. In that way, the two were inseparable – and so there was no choice to be made now.

  Geiger leaned to the laptop and went to Google Maps, typed in Hotel Maroq, Paris, France – and changed the view setting from ‘map’ to ‘satellite’. Slowly, he zoomed in like a pilot coming in for a rooftop landing. He knew that once he walked into the building, there would be eyes in place to watch him if he came out – on the street corner, or inside a parked car, or in a room in the hotel he could see was across the street – whose windows had a view of the Maroq’s lobby. It would be one of Dalton’s men, or one of Soames’s, or perhaps both – and he would have company wherever he went.

  He stopped the zoom when he was ‘hovering’ above the hotel roof. It was flat and non-reflective – likely tar-covered or concrete, which would suit his plans perfectly. The buildings to the left and right were each separated from the hotel by alleys Geiger guessed to be about eight feet wide. He would have to make it across one of the chasms. Jumping from a running start would be an option, but that kind of torque on his hips could be problematic.

  He clicked on iTunes and chose Ravel’s ‘Bolero’. Its foundation of a clean, repetitive melody, upon which a new instrument was added each time the motif came round, would help – a conducive accompaniment to the construction of a plan he could build on, layer upon layer. Long ago, he had learned how to slip inside the music in his mind – the downpour of notes like colored rain on a lake, each drop’s impact sending circles spreading out on the surface, meeting and mixing into each other, turning orange and blue and green into purple and violet and brown. He would float there and drift on the rainbowed water. Or dive down, to the bottom.

  He walked to the closet, and as he entered the flute slinked inside with him. He pulled the door shut and assumed his position in the darkness, a fetal curl on the cool floor. The snare drum crackled out of the speakers, and laid down a foundation. Focus was crucial. So many elements to weave together into a whole. He closed his eyes. The bassoon joined the melody on its third pass – rich blue, mint-cool swaths washing through Geiger’s brain. It would be like composing a symphony.

  14

  Geiger pulled the baseball cap down low on his forehead. He never wore hats, but back at Columbus Circle he’d passed a sidewalk vendor and decided an extra piece of camouflage could be useful. He had taken a cab across the Manhattan Bridge and then switched subway lines twice, and was certain that at this moment no one in the world knew where he was – on an upper West Side street, standing in a narrow space between an alley wall and a Norway maple, masked from view but with a wide sight-line.

  Morning had commandeered Seventy-fifth Street. Small children were marched out of front doors like prisoners of war to a waiting convoy of school buses. Women of color, in talkative brigades of three and four, weaved their way toward apartments they would clean. Warriors, girded in suits and skirts, tightening neckties and scarves, waved and hollered for their steel, yellow steeds.

  Ezra looked around his room. Lately, he forgot things. He pushed some sheet music on the desk aside and found his cell phone. He picked his backpack up from the floor and walked out down the hall. The shower was running in the bathroom.

  ‘Going, Mom!
’

  The water was turned off.

  ‘Don’t forget your money!’

  Ezra winced. ‘Don’t worry – I didn’t! Already got it!’ The water went back on and he went into the kitchen, took the ten-dollar bill off the counter. He knew she spent her life worrying about him now – if he didn’t call when he got to school . . . and when he left, if he didn’t have some breakfast . . . or finish his dinner, if he was getting homework done, if he was making friends, if he was getting enough sleep . . . or sleeping too much. When they were together he read her thoughts – she was wondering what to say, what to ask, what to leave unspoken. Try as she did, she was inept at fakery, and her smile had become an emblem of sadness. She loved him fiercely – and she made everything worse.

  He went to the door, patting his pockets to make sure he had his keys. As he reached for the knob he heard it, out in the hallway – more blunt complaint than plaintive.

  There are known things, certainties – of an empirical essence, or experiential proof, or historical consensus. And there are other things known, heartfelt – born in an instant. Ezra flung the door open. At his feet was a pet carrier, its price tag still attached by a string. Another meow came from inside. He knelt down and opened it, and the cat jumped out into his arms and burrowed into his chest. He thought he might burst into a trillion molecules . . . or dissolve into a puddle. He had lost the power of speech. He could not move. All because of this new known thing.

  On the bottom of the carrier lay a white envelope.

  Number sixty-four was three buildings down, and Geiger had an unobstructed view of Ezra barging out onto the stoop, the envelope in his hand, whirling in semicircles, clockwise – pausing to survey the street . . .

  ‘Geiger!’ Then spinning back the other way. ‘Geiiiiger!’

  Geiger had Ezra’s iChat name, and had given thought to making contact that way but dismissed the option. This way was cleaner. Information and nothing more. He saw flashes of light on the tearful eyes, and he could see joy in his face. He’d grown – he was at that scarecrow stage when the torso plays catch-up with dangling arms and gangly legs – and his voice had deepened. Geiger could see him – last July, on the couch, scratching the cat, and asking – ‘What’s it feel like to hurt somebody?’ – and Geiger had answered – ‘I don’t feel anything on a job. It isn’t about me.’

  Ezra sat down on the top step. He had been changed, delivered to some vibrant state of grace. He looked at the hum and rush around him, peered into the shadows and nooks. You’re out there, he thought. I know it. I can’t see you – but you can see me, and, as you would say – if that’s what works best for you, it’s okay with me. You’re alive.

  He opened the envelope and pulled out a sheet of paper. The text was typed, double-spaced.

  Now you know.

  Tomorrow I am leaving here, going out of the country, and will not return.

  I am going to try and help your father and Harry. They are in trouble.

  I do not want you to think you have been abandoned by any of us.

  Do not show this letter to anyone.

  I call the cat Tony now, as you suggested. I saw that you have a fire escape outside a window of your apartment in back. Leave the window open so he can go out at night. As you know, he will always come back.

  He was the strangest person Ezra had ever known. A jumble of opposite and inexplicable traits, an emotional Frankenstein – as if a mad psychic surgeon had taken feelings from different people and stitched them all together inside Geiger’s mind. And now . . . What was happening now? The boy’s eyes went back to one line of the letter, and its cold, blunt force hit and chilled him again. I do not want you to think you have been abandoned by any of us. For a moment he was back underwater, in the river’s black, blind turmoil, others’ hands clawing at him – then someone had pulled him free and pushed him toward the surface, and life. A tear plopped down onto the paper.

  Geiger watched Ezra put the letter back in the envelope and stand up. The boy didn’t bother to explore the street again. He just turned, opened the front door and walked back inside. When Geiger was sure Ezra wasn’t coming back out, he left the shadows and walked away.

  Those who dealt with Carmine Delanotte were likely aware his doctor made him quit smoking fifteen years ago. Those close to him knew temptation still beckoned, and that he went to great lengths to minimize its siren call. These measures included no smoking in his presence, restaurant, homes, and the Cadillac. Geiger knew that his driver, Rollie, was a chain smoker – and while he waited down the block from La Bella Ristorante in the black CTS-V sedan with tinted, bullet-proof windows, he would get out of the car two dozen times a shift to have a cigarette. And, Geiger had often been in Carmine’s presence when he’d told Eddie to have the car brought round and Eddie had repeated the order into a Nextel – so he’d heard Rollie’s gravel-voiced response. The same four words, every time. Geiger also knew that when it was time to go home, Carmine would come out with Eddie – Eddie would open the passenger-side back door and step aside while Carmine got in, then close the door and go around the back of the car to the driver’s side and get in beside the boss.

  Geiger knew more than enough for what he needed to do. The last thing Carmine had said to him, nine months ago, before he betrayed him, was: ‘Life owns your ass – from day one, cradle to grave. You don’t get it, Geiger. You think you can choose whether you’re in or not, but you can’t. If you come out of this alive, you remember that.’ And Geiger had remembered.

  Mulberry Street was sleepy. The Cadillac was parked by a liquor store that had been closed for hours. The driver’s door opened, Rollie’s feet swung out, and when he was nearly erect, an unlit cigarette in his lips, the door was shoved closed, pinning him at the calves and neck. He managed a dismayed gurgle before an elbow smashed into his temple, his chauffeur’s cap went flying, and the light in his eyes went out.

  Carmine took a last sip of his double espresso, then sat back, drawing lines in the tablecloth with a fingernail. The broccoli rabe hadn’t felt fresh. He’d make a call tomorrow and put the hammer down. He picked up his copy of the Wall Street Journal.

  ‘Eddie . . . Time to go.’

  The man in the black suit standing behind Carmine unclasped his hands from in front of his belt buckle and took out a Nextel push-to-call. ‘Rollie, bring the car up.’

  The rough voice crackled back. ‘On my way, boss.’

  Carmine’s deep blue eyes took a final look at the elegant, emptied restaurant, and then he rose from his chair with a throaty grunt.

  ‘Jesus . . . How old am I, Eddie?’

  ‘I dunno, boss.’ Eddie’s face remained a death mask. ‘I lost track.’

  Carmine chuckled, shaking his head like a man who has done many remarkable, terrible things . . . and remembers them all. He was aware of the soft weariness settling down on him, day by day. The wisdom born of wicked things was a cold, grim companion, but he still kept it close, just the same.

  The two men walked to the door, where the maitre d’ held it open.

  ‘Goodnight, Mr. D.’

  ‘Goodnight, Kenny.’

  The Cadillac idled at the curb. Eddie moved ahead of Carmine, opened the back door and Carmine got inside. Eddie closed the door . . .

  Carmine settled back into the soft taupe leather. ‘How are you, Rollie?’

  The driver waited until Eddie showed up in the rearview mirror and hit the gas.

  Carmine perked up, and glanced out the back window. ‘Rollie . . . Hey. You forgot Eddie.’ He watched Eddie recede, his hands rising in a what-the-fuck?! exclamation.

  ‘Hello, Carmine.’

  The cold, satin delivery slid into Carmine’s ears like an ice pick. ‘Jesus fucking mother of Christ . . .’ Each word came out more slowly and softer than the one before, until the last was no more than a whisper.

  Eddie’s voice barked from somewhere inside the car. ‘Boss?! Boss?!’

  When Carmine turned back around, Geige
r saw his reflection in the mirror. He was smiling. He looked absolutely delighted.

  ‘Okay . . . Shocked? Yeah, to my bones,’ Carmine said. ‘But why aren’t I surprised? Jesus, it’s good to see you, Geiger. Really. It’s wonderful.’

  Geiger turned east on Canal Street, and took off Rollie’s cap and put it on the seat.

  ‘I wasn’t certain you’d feel that way.’

  Carmine’s grin stretched out even more. ‘No? Why not? You’re my boy.’

  ‘That’s what you said just before you drugged me and gave me to Hall . . . and Dalton.’

  ‘I mean it now and I meant it then. Broke my heart handing you over. God’s truth.’ He shrugged. ‘Business is something else entirely. You know that. You know what I have to deal with sometimes. The government spooks . . . They want something from me – I can’t say no.’

  Eddie spoke up again. ‘Boss! What’s going on?!’

  Geiger tossed Rollie’s Nextel in the backseat. ‘I’d prefer he didn’t over-react.’

  Carmine picked up the phone and punched in. ‘Relax, Eddie. Nothing to worry about. I’m fine. I’m with Geiger.’

  ‘With who?! Did you say Geiger?!’

  ‘Yes.’ Carmine punched off and sat back. ‘Am I fine, Geiger?’

  Geiger turned left. Carmine lowered a window and looked out at the street sign.

  They were on Ludlow Street. Geiger’s old session house was fifty yards up the block. Carmine nodded to himself. Returning to the scene of the crime. It was a nice touch.

  Geiger started to slow. ‘I haven’t been back here since Dalton worked on me.’

  ‘I have it rented out – for photoshoots. Fashion, mainly. I have your barber’s chair, though. In my rec room. Works beautifully there.’

  Geiger pulled over and put it in park. He lifted his eyes to the two-story building’s square, black windows, coated with the sole streetlamp’s glare. He was still inside. Part of him would always be inside there.